Twitter increases ad transparency

In the wake of the ongoing investigation into how social media advertising impacted the 2016 US Presidential Election, Twitter has announced it will launch a new transparency centre in coming weeks to provide greater transparency over all ads on the platform. It will cover how long ads have been running, overview of advertising creative, ads targeted to you and the personalised information available from your profile which impacts ads you’re eligible to be targeted for.

Facebook expands new Explore Feed

Is this the end of organic reach? As part of its new Explore Feed, Facebook is exploring whether to make this the place to receive posts from all pages – not just those you aren’t connected to. While organic reach has been dwindling for years and the ‘pay to play’ mantra for brand content has increased, any permanent switch to this Explore Feed set-up could spell the end of organic reach for good and shake up paid strategies even further.

LinkedIn smart replies

LinkedIn wants to help you keep the conversation going, unveiling its smart reply feature which will suggest phrases to keep you chatting. These predictive phrases will help improve the messaging function on mobile and tablet, ultimately aiming to help LinkedIn built its market of professionals using its messaging service. It also signals the platform’s commitment to trialing Artificial Intelligence technology and how it can improve user experience.

Facebook group admins get new features

LinkedIn isn’t the only platform looking to improve dialogue this week. Facebook has launched new group admin features this week to help admins communicate with and build their communities. A new welcome post feature will help admins welcome new members, admins will be more readily identifiable, and group-specific profiles based on publicly available information will help group members learn more about each other in the hope that this will foster more and greater connections.

Read more about the features and how they’ll impact your in-group experience here.

Instagram extends Live Guests access

Instagram has rolled out its Live Guests feature to all users. Aimed at young users and the increasing popularity of Instagram Live, the function will allow users to invite anyone who’s watching to join the chat. For now, you’ll only be able to go live with one other person at a time – though you can change who that person is mid-stream.

View the full announcement and additional features from Instagram here.

Follow us on Twitter for news of these social media and content marketing changes as they happen.

It is important to note they aren’t giving up on social media completely, they are just being social in a more direct way.

But, in the eyes of many people, Facebook is social media.

The more that this audience moves away from traditional platforms like Facebook, the more you’ll see stories appear about the ‘death of social media’ which will only fuel the broader backlash movement.

In the defence of Domino’s, they did a terrific job of reaching out to people that had voiced their displeasure towards the brand and offered them the chance to try one of the new pizzas for free.

It is a good reminder that adding value to the lives of your online communities, as opposed to pushing commercial messages, is the best way to achieve social media success.

Will the backlash really be worse in 2014?

All signs point to yes even though there has been no shortage of detractors over the last five years.

As outlined, the primary factors will be platform fragmentation, several (fair) questions from the industry, and the increasing apprehension of the public in response to overly commercial social media tactics.

It will be interesting to see how far the expected backlash goes and what impact it will have.

For more commentary around each of these reasons, refer to this blog post.

Where to from here?

For some individuals and organisations, blogging can seem like a daunting thing to implement. And, in some cases, they’re just not practical.

However, the ‘blogging mentality’ is something that can make an impact in businesses of all shapes and sizes. Even just having someone within your marketing and communications team who has some experience in the blogging space, can help develop content solutions that can cut through the noise.

The blog is well and truly back and will play a huge role in the success of content marketing strategies in 2014.

Look out for part 14 of our Social Media Trends 2014 series which examines the one constant trend in the digital marketing space and why it will only escalate next year.

‘(Not provided)’ – This year, Google essentially cut off all keyword data that explained how people discovered your site through search. It is part of a calculated provide better online privacy but also to put a premium on the insights linked to the paid Google AdWords product.

PageRank goes missing – Google’s PageRank has traditionally been a way to measure the importance of websites in the eyes of Google. In 2013, PageRank scores were not updated as regularly as we’re used to which suggests that it may disappear completely soon.

Hummingbird – Google names each of its algorithm updates which tend to be rolled out every few months or so. The Hummingbird update essentially made it easier for Google to process conversational enquiries e.g. “tell me where to find a search engine optimization provider in my city”

Google+ – Google’s ‘social layer’ continues to evolve and have greater influence on Google’s search product. It is the engine that drives people-powered search results and has become a major page ranking factor in 2013.

Authorship – Google’s ‘Author Rank’ is an attempt to make verified content producers more visible in search results. There are many reasons for the increased focus on authorship but mainly it aims to make anonymous content creators less relevant, while rewarding long-time and trusted sources.

In-depth articles – This feature is a recent introduction from Google and it serves up a block of in-depth articles along with the standard results based on your search query.

What does it all mean and what can we expect in 2014

Put simply, Google is doing all it can to humanise search results.

People trust people more than they’ll ever trust an algorithm.

People-powered results are also more difficult to manipulate from an SEO perspective.

This is why people are regularly say that ‘SEO is dead’.

It isn’t dead, there is just a renewed amount of importance on creating quality content designed for humans, not algorithms.

The other factor, which people often forget, is that Google’s reason for being is to make money.

It makes a huge slice of it’s money from the AdWords product which delivers sponsored results alongside the organic ones.